"There are countless horrible things happening all over the world and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible." -Auberon Waugh

Thursday, July 23, 2015

No, Bob Corker, you don’t get to pretend that you aren’t a big part of this disaster

Failure Theater only works so long as voters are willing to suspend their (natural) belief in the hypocrisy and uselessness of unprincipled, time-serving frauds. I don’t think it’s likely that this suspension of belief will hold up much longer. It will be interesting to see if people like McConnell and Boehner (and Corker) ultimately wind up being retired from public life in spite of, or perhaps precisely because of, their attempts to finesse the conflicts between their presumed base of voters (for whom they are contemptuous) and their big-money donors (for whom they manifest an unseemly solicitousness).

Frankly, I wouldn’t have thought McConnell and Boehner, at least, were good enough actors to pull off their con against the conservative base for as long as they have, but who knows? Maybe they’re just exceptionally good pork-barrelistas , or it could be that their political opponents have been extraordinarily inept.